Rainfall prevents farmers’ planting

Forecasts warm, wet, officials say

Prospects for Arkansas farmers and spring planting this year don’t look much better than last year, when a record 1.3 million acres went unplanted because of persistent rainfall.

“We’re facing the same predicament as last year,” John Lewis III, senior forecaster at the National Weather Service in North Little Rock,” said Thursday. “We started off wet last year. We started off wet again this year.”

The 1.3 million acres in “prevented planting” in Arkansas was fifth-highest in the nation. In 2018, the number was 187,875 acres.

Nationally, farmers didn’t plant on 19.4 million acres, also a record, compared with 2 million acres not planted in 2018.

Rainfall across Arkansas is about 6 inches above average for the year, with West Memphis 8 inches above average, Texarkana 7 inches above average, and Jonesboro and Little Rock about 6.5 inches above average, according to weather service reports.

“The soil moisture footprint is very wet in quite a few areas west of the Rocky Mountains,” Lewis said. “With those levels and if you get a heavy rain, water

v has nowhere to go.”

River levels in Arkansas on the Black, Cache, Ouachita and lower White rivers (below Batesville) are already high, he said.

Forecasts for the next three months are for a wetter and warmer remainder of spring and early summer. “It’s not good,” Lewis said. “Overall, we’re in a weather pattern that just refuses to break, just like last year.”

Corn is among the state’s early-planted crops.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Monday said about 2% of the state’s corn crop had been planted, compared with 10% this time last year. The 5-year average this early in the spring is 14%, according to the USDA’s National Agriculture Statistics Service.

For the most part, soybean farmers aren’t in bad shape yet, but they’re getting “antsier, more anxious every day,” said Jeremy Ross, a soybean specialist with the University of Arkansas System’s Division of Agriculture. “We really need a 10-day window [of no rain] to get going. We could get a lot done and move further down the road,” he said.

Farmers in south Arkansas, where soybeans tend to be planted early, need to be planting in earnest about two weeks from now for the highest yields, he said, while farmers in northern Arkansas are looking at mid-May for their optimum planting season.

Soybeans, generally, are planted after corn and rice are planted. They’re also, by acreage, the state’s largest row crop.

Fields, especially in eastcentral Arkansas, are in standing water, Ross said. “A lot of farmers still have a lot of field prep to do. It’s just been too wet for it,” he said.

The National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Ala., projects likely flooding across the central and southeastern U.S. this spring, with moderate to high risk along the upper and middle Mississippi River basins, the Missouri River basin and the Red River in the northern U.S.

Arkansas will catch a lot of that water.

“Our biggest weather event last year was the flooding of the Arkansas River,” Lewis said. “The rain that caused that wasn’t even here, it was from Oklahoma and Kansas.”